Byron Spikes in Tech Explore:
Yuichi Hirose has a dream—a dream that someday everyone will have access to a machine capable of knitting furniture.
This machine wouldn’t just knit the furniture’s exterior fabric, but would use knitting to fashion solid three-dimensional chairs, tables and other objects. Tired of that love seat? Just unravel it and reuse the yarn to knit yourself an ottoman. This new fabrication technique—first envisioned by Hirose, a robotics Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science—is called solid knitting. The idea captured his imagination more than a decade ago. And now, working with a research team headed by James McCann, an associate professor in the Robotics Institute, he’s made it a reality.
“My dream is to have these solid knitting machines everywhere in the world,” Hirose said.
While he was still building the machine, Hirose saw a report on the internet about a software project by McCann that made it easier to reprogram commercial knitting machines. This method provided a practical way to use the machines to make customized 3D knitted pieces. These were hollow shapes, such as bunny rabbits that could be stuffed, not solid knitted pieces, but Hirose and McCann began talking about a possible collaboration.
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